Here's two things we desperately need:

1. An authoritative textbook-style index/survey-article on eveything in LW. We have been generating lots of really cool intellectual work, but without a prominently placed, complete, hierarchical, and well-updated overview of "here's the state of what we know", we arent accumulating knowledge. This is a big project and I don't know how I could make it happen, besides pushing the idea, which is famously ineffective.

2. LW needs a king. This idea is bound to be unpopular, but how awesome would it be to have someone who's paid job it was to make LW into an awesome and effective community. I imagine things like getting proper studies done of how site layout/design should be to make LW easy to use and sticky to the right kind of people (currently sucks), contacting, coordinating, and encourageing meetup organizers individually (no one does this right now and lw-organizers has little activity), thinking seriously and strategically about problems like OP, and leading big projects like idea #1. Obviously this person would have CEO-level authority.

One problem is that our really high-power agent types who are super dedicated to the community (i.e. lukeprog) get siphoned off into SI. We need another lukeprog or someone to be king of LW and deal with this kind of stuff.

Without a person in this king role, the community has to waste time and effort making community-meta threads like these. Communities and democratic methods suck at doing the kind of strategic, centralized, coherent decision making that we really need. It really isn't the comparative advantage of the community to be having to manage these problems. If these problems were dealt with, it would be a lot easier to focus on intellectual productivity.